Here is a review by Becky: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/2154186432

(scheduled for March 2018 blog post)
Clancy's mother died in a skydiving accident when Clancy was six years old. Now 16, Clancy's overprotective father lets her work at his skydiving company, the same place where her mother died a decade earlier, so that he can keep a watchful eye on his daughter. Clancy packs parachutes for other skydivers, but her dad won't give her permission to jump from a perfectly good airplane. He doesn't even want Clancy to drive herself anywhere, or ride in a car with her best friend Julia. Clancy meets an 18 year old college freshman Denny from Denver, who has arrived to film a skydiving video for his best friend who is in the hospital back in Colorado. Thanks to a simple misunderstanding, Denny assumes Clancy is already in college, and she intentionally lets him keep thinking that she is older. Nor does Clancy mention her lifeguard boyfriend Theo. Clancy is starting to feel pressed in her relationship with Theo, who by all accounts should be a knight-in-shining armour but has lately been driving Clancy a little crazy by making all her decisions for her. Then Theo gets a last minute job at a summer camp in Idaho, far away from Clancy's summer skydiving work in rural Missouri, and Clancy sees a chance at finding herself.
Author Tracy Barrett does a good job of incorporating into the novel a lot of information about something very few readers, especially high school readers, will know much about: skydiving. I can't think of another book, YA or other, that has used a skydiving school as the primary setting. As a literary device, the act of jumping out of an airplane -- freeing oneself of inhibitions and risking one's life in a freefall plummeting to earth -- could take on many meanings and has the potential to be greatly overused. Surprisingly, Barrett leaves the potential exploitation of these thematic metaphors, similes, and (likely) cliches relatively untouched. It is up to the reader to decipher the apparent symbolism.
Despite its potential, some of the book's major characters experience little growth and eventually fall flat. Clancy's overly protective father, who never talked to Clancy about her mother after the accident, drops a bombshell on Clancy at the end of the novel but has only become slightly less clingy. Clancy is a contradiction; she is both strong and independent yet controlled by her father and boyfriend in the beginning, and by the end is only starting to find her way. Theo, Clancy's boyfriend, comes and goes from the story too conveniently, even when he's fifteen hundred miles (or a 24 hours' drive one way) away. It's convenient to the plot that he shows up for 'a long weekend' when he does, but it's hard to fathom a 16 year old driving 48 hours round trip for just a few hours at home. Denny plays the role of psychologist and causes Clancy to think about her own motivations and reasoning, but also exits all too abruptly.
Teen readers might look past the flaws and enjoy the story without digging too deeply. I'll buy a couple copies for my library and see if anyone is willing to "jump out of a perfectly good airplane" with it.

When I saw Freefall Summer I thought it was going to be a story like Heather Demetrios’s Bad Romance, in which I mean I thought it would be a gritty observation on the affect an abusive relationship can have on a teen. I was wrong. I could tell by the time I was about five chapters in that this was not a book about abusive YA relationships, and next I believed that this novel would romanticize relationships between a high-schooler and an adult (and yes – even though Denny is only eighteen, he is an <b>adult</b>) but I was wrong again. Thankfully. What <i>Freefall Summer</i> actually is is what you would think from glancing at the cover: a YA romance that might not be super deep, and might be cliché, but is really easy to read.
The characters and plot in <i>Freefall Summer</i> were taken right out of some classic YA contemporary tropes: cute, innocent, blonde female has a dad who is nice but kind of controlling, and she also has a boyfriend who is nice but kind of controlling (and who bores her); aforementioned cute, innocent, blonde female meets a new boy, they deny their feelings for each other, she tries to decide if she sould break up with her boo, drama ensues. I’ve read it before and I’m sure I’ll read it again. One thing better in <i>Freefall Summer</i> was the addition of some fun subplots and facts about sky-diving. I now really want to go sky-diving. I thought it was kind of weird how obsessed Clancy’s dad was about sky-diving, but we all have our quirks.
However, not only was the plot cliché, but it was also realllllllly slow. It was easy-reading, so it was fine, but I didn’t feel that the plot really got going until about 60 percent into the novel. So much about the blurb and the first few chapters promises that Clancy’s lies would bring her life crashing down but they really….. didn’t???? I mean, some stuff did happen because of her choices, but there really wasn’t any giant emotional scarring going on for anyone involved. I was sitting there waiting for the drama to get started and then before I knew it the book was over.
If you’ve read the blurb, you know that Clancy falls in love with this guy who is a freshman in college, and leads him to believe that she, too, is eighteen. This is literally the main plot of the novel, and yet their relationship was completely <b>undeveloped and lacking in chemistry<b>. In any other book, a relationship between an eighteen year-old and a high schooler is either romanticized (hate this) or challenged consistently throughout the novel (good, it should be), and <i>Freefall Summer</i> kind of falls into the first category, but, honestly, Clancy and Denny’s relationship was so bland that there <b>wasn’t really any content to romanticize off of</b>. The one passage that I did highlight pertaining to their relationship is this:
<blockquote><i>”Do I wish now, knowing everything that happened next, that I’d told him I was in high school and only sixteen? Everything would have been different. Most people would say that everything would have been better.
And maybe it would. But even so, if I had it all to do over again, I know I’d let him go on thinking I was a college student and eighteen years old.”</i></blockquote>
Yeah. And yes, Clancy was an idiot for lying, but, more importantly, Denny was an idiot for not putting the pieces together because there were some pretty obvious clues going down. The age discrepancy was really not challenged enough, even for such a weakly written romance.
My main problem with this book though is the demonizing of Theo and the acceptance of cheating. Theo was by no means a perfect boyfriend, but I felt as though his main purpose in the novel was to show that Clancy needed someone “mature” who “treated her like an adult” as a boyfriend, which brings us back to the inevitable problematic romanticizing of a statutory relationship. But what really pissed me off is the way this book portrays cheating. Clancy is emotionally cheating on Theo with Denny for a good 60 percent of the novel, but when it is revealed that <spoiler>Theo cheated on her while he was away at camp</spoiler>, Clancy, and the book, uses this as a way to excuse Clancy’s emotional cheating, and implying that emotional cheating is an okay thing to do. She even kind of <i>admits</i> that she’s emotionally cheating on Theo, with this passage: <i>”Also, I figured if I took [Denny] To Manuelito’s, no one who saw us would be suspicious, because if I was cheating, I wouldn’t be so public about it.”</i> However, while reading I just figured that Clancy would go through character development and realize that she was completely projecting onto Theo and that emotional cheating, even if you are planning on breaking up with your significant other, is wrong, but she <b>never does</b>. The book never challenges Clancy’s own cheating, rather, it does the opposite in Clancy’s projecting her own cheating onto Theo, when she sees a picture of Theo with another girl and automatically assumes he’s cheating on her. <spoiler>And it doesn’t matter that he was – it still doesn’t justify Clancy’s own cheating.</spoiler>
<blockquote><i>”Even though Cynthia’s jump had been awesome, it wasn’t enough to distract me from the picture of Theo. </i>Why was he hugging that girl? Okay, maybe they were celebrating a hard climb or something, but th way she was leaning into him and he was squeezing her looked too cozy somehow<i>.”</i></blockquote>
There was also a kind of disturbing conversation between Clancy and her best friend Julia where Julia tries to convince Clancy to “play games” with Theo.
<blockquote><i>”It might be really good for your relationship with Theo if you dropped some hints about Denny. [sic] Even if you’re telling the truth, there’s no harm in making Theo think there </i>is<i> something going on.”
“I don’t see why, and besides, it’s childish to play games.”
“Oh, but playing games is fun! Why do you think they call it playing? Everyone does it anyway, and besides, it works.”</i></blockquote>
That whole conversation just made me really uncomfortable?? Idk. It’s just totally wrong to put forward the fact that telling your significant other things for the purpose of making them jealous is an okay and healthy thing to do in a relationship.